I have a little project at the moment to try and reorganise my desk in my room to actually work a little better for how I use it now. Over the last few years, I have gravitated to using laptops as my primary systems (as I’m sure many other people have also done). This means that the way I organise my workspace needs really to take account of that shift in what I use most of the time.

When I was using my MacBook Pro at the desk, I really wanted to be able to lift it up so the screen was at a greater height, for ergonomic reasons. I also have access to a standalone Apple aluminium keyboard which made acquiring some sort of stand to lift up the machine and then use the standalone keyboard quite an attractive idea.

The Griffin Elevator is actually one of the most popular, go-to products for, well, elevating laptops, especially within the Mac product ecosystem. There are alternative options to the Elevator, some more specifically tailored to the MacBook Pro and the specific model I have, but I ended up going ahead and purchasing the Elevator as my solution to this problem.

I have to say I’m pretty happy with it.

The product is basically two aluminium arms (which incidentally match the MacBook Pro’s aluminium body nicely), a plastic base in which the arms slot and two bits of plastic which slot onto the end of the arms just to provide an extra protection against the machine slipping off the end. The contact surfaces on the arms grip surprisingly well — with the MacBook Pro, there is a little bit of wobble if you try to slide the machine across them, but unless you use a lot of force the machine won’t budge.

It is quite expensive for what it is, but for me it now solves the ergonomic problem by lifting up the screen to my eye height and has the advantage of providing more than adequate room for cooling.

A dual keyboard setup! Unnecessary? Perhaps. But it does prevent you from straining if you are typing ‘at’ something on the second monitor, which you want to look at whilst typing.

It’s also useful if you want to have something open for reference and glancing at up on the white MacBook screen (*cough* Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible *cough*). Just don’t need to type anything on that machine. And if you do, you hook up the wired Apple keyboard to that machine instead.

Yesterday my brand new MacBook Pro 15″ arrived.

I got my original white MacBook over two years ago and it quickly became my primary machine. The seamlessness of the Apple hardware-software connection, its increased performance over my existing Linux PC and the desire to learn about OS X motivated this. Since then it has been, for the most part, my primary computer.

The MacBook still is an excellent machine for what it does, but being a full-time desktop as well as a portable computer, I began to desire a larger screen for when I’m using it at the desk and to get away from the limitation of the rather pathetic Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics.

So to address these issues and erm… continue my investment into computing (nothing to do with the fact that the new Pros are just, really, nice) I went out and bought the new 15″ MacBook Pro.

I got the middle model, with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and the dual GPU Nvidia GeForce 9400M (for battery life) and Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT 512 MB (for performance).

I’ve had it just hours, but I love this machine!

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